The diary of a dedicated Ubuntu user that lucked into his dream job working on the Ubuntu team.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

The End of an Era?

Today I committed and pushed a change to Photobomb to remove functionality! The web tab used to allow users to search the web for images. So you could search for "cat" and get the most popular kitteh pix ready to mix into our images. No longer. You can still plug in a web address, and Photobomb will it's best to find an image there, but no more web searches.

A couple of weeks ago, Google retired the Google API I was using, so I switched to Yahoo!, only to find that the Yahoo! one got retired a week or so ago.

Both services switched to newer APIs. The thing is, both Google and Yahoo! now charge an application for using those APIs. Yup, I would have to pay actual money to use the services.

I really don't have a problem with them doing that. I mean, someone has to pay to keep those services running. And I suppose if I charged a bit for Photobomb, I could use that to fund paying for the services. However, at the moment, I don't really feel like dealing with setting up an account and dealing with all that, in addition to recoding to the new APIs.

So, I guess the era of the web giants competing to get me to use their "free" services has drawn to a close. I suppose it's a bit like a bursting bubble. Goodbye free web-services :/